This document describes a semester-long project in an ESL class where students created photographs, poems, and stories depicting their lives as immigrants in America. They then exhibited their work at their school and a community center. Finally, they performed a multimedia show called "Postcards from America" combining their photos, writing, music, and acting. The project aimed to improve students' English skills while connecting their classroom learning to their personal experiences and community. Teachers collaborated with artists and photographers to guide students through workshops in photography, writing, and performance. The culminating performance allowed students to share their stories and gain confidence in their language abilities.

1. "PostcardsfromAmerica":
LinkingClassroomand
CommunityinanESLClass
EILEENLANDAY BETHMEEHAN,WITH MARY
A. LEONARDNEWMAN,KURT AND DONALDWOOTTON, W. KINGI
riel Montero stands in the doonvay of a downstairs meeting room of Progreso
Latino, an education and community service organization in Central Falls, Rhode
Island. The meeting room has been temporarily converted into an art gallery,
and an opening reception, complete with hors d'oeuzjres and punch, is in prog-
1 ress. About a hundred people fill the room. Ariel, fifteen years old and one of the featured
artists, studies the scene. Recently emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Cen-
tral Falls, Rhode Island, he is a student in Leonard Newman and Richard Kinslow's
Accelerated Literacy Class at Central Falls Senior
High School.
Today,he and thirty classmates-all recently
arrived in the US with little or no prior English-
are hosting a display of their photographs and writ-
ing at Progreso Latino. Ariel's photo, titled "Jenks
Park Tower," is a strikingcomposition of a localland-
mark as seen through the bars of a jungle gym on
which two of his friends are playing. Mounted on
the wall next to the photo is a companion poem by
classmate Bruno Alves, which conveys in print the
same images that appear in Ariel's photo.
Jenks Park Tower
Symbol of my city
Central Falls
I see the clock
I hear the children playing
I feel happy when I'm in the park.
I play soccer
I play football and
I swingon the swingswith
my friends.
A good place for children to play,
a good place to have fun, and
a good place to chill with my friends.
Jenks Park is in Central Falls.
-Bruno Alves
Other photos in the exhibit and the accompanying
poems, letters, and stories highlight other aspects of
these student's lives in this small Rhode Island city.
They depict places and people: landmarks and local
businesses;friends,alone andin groups;families,in-
door and out. Children are the subject of much of
the work-younger siblings of the artists or mem-
bers of their extended families. At the opening re-
ception, with their work mounted and hung around
the room, the youthful artists watch as visitors circu-
late, commenting on their photos andwriting. Some
are shy,hanging back, observant; others engage with
guests, discussing the work and the project.
Two weeks later, these same students stand
on the stagein thehgh schoolauditorium, againpre-
senting their originalwork to the public, this time in
a multimedia performance they named "Postcards
from America." In the nine performance pieces
that make up "Postcards," students' photographs-
projected in giant size onto screens on the stage-
are combined with music, dance, and theatrical
performance of their writing portraying personal
stories of the immigrant experience.
may 2 0 0 1 Copyright O 2001 Eileen Landay,All rights reserved.

2. "Jenks ParkTower" Photoby Ariel Montero
Thesetwoeventswere the culminatingactiv-
itiesof a semester-longprojectthat studentsworked
on in Newman and Kinslow's classduringthe spring
of 2000. Working with their teachers and a profes-
sional photographer, students produced a visual
record of their friends,families, homes, and neigh-
borhood. They then translated those visual images
intoprint texts.Thephotoswere mounted alongside
studentwritingandexhibited,first at the school,and
lateratProgresoLatino.Severalstudents'photosap-
pearedinthe area'smajornewspaper,theProvidence
JournaLBulletin.Finally,withthe assistanceofaper-
forming artist, students created nine performance
pieces inspiredby the photography andwriting. The
culminatingactivity, the multimedia production of
"PostcardsfromAmerica,"wasperformedonJune2,
2000, at Central Falls High School.
The project drew on the resources of three
different but overlapping communities: 1)the in-
ternal community of classroom and school; 2) the
community of the students' homes and neighbor-
hoods;and 3)the extended communityof business,
the arts, higher education, and social services.
The overalldesignof "Postcards"-engaging
students in learningEnglish languageskillsthrough
workshops on photography, creative writing, and
drama-was createdby NewmanandKinslowincol-
laboration with Kurt Wootton, Director of the
ArtsLiteracy Project (ALP)at Brown ~niversity.~
A/LP is a cukcufum developmentand
development project that works with secondary
school teachers during summers and the academic
year to explore the potential of performance work
for developing literacy skills among adolescents.
Founded three years agoat BrownUniversity, ALP
carriesoutthisworkbypairingteachersandartspro-
fessionals.Thispartnership beginswith an extensive
summer professional development program and
continues in teachers' classrooms during the aca-
demic year. Teachers and artists plan andteach to-
getherin collaborationwith an experiencedmentor,
who observes and debriefs their work. Brown Uni-
versity students interested in teaching with and
throuih the arts participate as classroom assistants
and documentors.
While its initial work has been in theatre
arts,the Arts/LiteracyProjectisneither atraditional
dramaprogram that focuses on replicating a prod-
uct for audience consumption nor process drama
work, which focuses on role play as a method for

3. developing anddeepeningparticipants' understand-
ing of content and skill in perspective-taking. (For
an overview of the process drama approach, devel-
opedin the UK by Dorothy Heathcote, seeWagner,
1998.) Combining elements of both approaches,
ALP'S major focus is to construct a classroom com-
munity in which adolescents develop the skills and
habits of mind to conveymeaning through-and re-
cover meaning from-a range of symbol systems,
most explicitly,print text.
A participant in MLP since its inception
three years ago, Newman has regularly taken part
in summer and academic year programs, working
closelywith other teachers, professional actors, and
mentors. In previous work with MLP, Newman
had developed a writing-to-performance program
he called "Stories Keep Our Cultures Alive." Now,
with Wootton's assistance, they expanded the pro-
gram to include Mary Beth Meehan, a staff pho-
tographer with The Providence Journal Bulletin,
and Donald King, the artistic director of the Prov-
idence Black Repertory Company. With the newly-
added photography component, Newman and
Kinslow's students were able to use several media
to make their work visible to the community and to
describe in words, images, and performances the
rich and complex experience of being a newcomer
in the United States. In the sections that follow,
each of the teaching participants describes hidher
contribution to and perspective on the project. The
final section reviews the ways inwhich internal and
external communities intersected in support of
the project.
Beginning with Photography
Mary Beth Meehan
Since 1995,my work at The ProvidenceJournal has
been to round out the picture of the urban immi-
grant experience in Rhode Island, to go beyond the
quick-hit news story to communicate the complex
experience of life as a newcomer to America. Inter-
ested to learn whatwould happen if adolescent new-
comers were given the opportunity to present their
world through visual images, I began to work with
students in Central Falls's Accelerated Literacy
classroom. The Nikon Camera Company donated
thirty point-and-shoot cameras for the students to
use. The Prouidence Journal provided film, pro-
cessing,computer accessand equipment, and print-
ing. TheJournal also gave me the use of a laptop
computer and video projector to conduct the class.
The Nikon Camera
Company donated thirty
point-and-shoot cameras
for the students to use
Twice weekly, from January 3 to March 28,
2000, I met with the students in Len Newman and
Richard Kinslow's Accelerated Literacy class. The
assignment was to create photographs of their
friends, families, and communities. As predicted,
students initially saw the camera as an instrument
with which to record static situations, posed snap-
shots of each other-"statue" pictures. To introduce
them to the concept of the candidphoto, we showed
them work by photographers in the documentary
tradition. By discussingthese photographs, students
came to see what could be captured with a camera
and learned a vocabulary of photography. (See Fig-
ure 1.)Alongwith the technical vocabulary,the stu-
dents used their general English vocabulary to talk
about themselves, their families, and their friends.
They had to articulate what mattered to them-
what they loved, what they hated-and they had to
learn to explicate a photograph: to describe who or
what was pictured, and how the person or the situ-
ation made them feel.
Our goals were to
help students understand the importance
of photographing their lives and see that
stories of their daily experiences would be
of interest to others
identify what those stories were
find a way to tell those stories
photographically
After the students photographed, I chose
and presented a weekly selection of their work, and
we developed a rubric for loohng at photographs.
(See Figure 2.)

4. FIGURE1. Moving to Stories
PHOTOGRAPHYCHECKLIST
Len Newman
Is the photograph clear?
Is the subjectwellframed?
Is the subject infocus?
Is the subject of the photographfree of distractions?
Does the photograph tell a story?
Does the photograph bring outfeelings?
1. What were you lookingat when you took the
photograph?
2. What did you see in the viewfinder?
3. Who is in your photograph?
4. Where are they?
5. Describe the location/room,etc.where the photograph
was taken.
6. What are the people in the photograph doing?
7. What do you think they were doingbefore the
photograph was taken?
8. Look at your photograph carefully.Tell the storythat
you see in the photograph.
The necessity of linking the verbal to the vi-
sual brought home to us how much these two skill
areas complement one another. Students with only
rudimentary English were justifiably proud of their
photographs, which displayed a sense of composi-
tion, framing, moment, and lyricism. The works of
Ariel Montero and Crisolita Teixeira were two
stunning examples; they made inspired and beau-
tiful photographs. (Ariel's photographs rival those
of many professionals.) Other studentsjust begin-
ning to learn English produced similarly success-
ful work.
These students showed us that, while some
people work from the verbal toward the visual
(learning about photography and then attempting
it),students learning a new language can often ben-
efit by exploring the visual and then creating lan-
guage around it (making a photograph and then
describing it). Either way, language skills develop.
For ten weeks, beginning in January, we looked at,
talked about, and took photographs. Students took
photographs in school, at home, and in the commu-
nity. Each week, they talked about their own pic-
tures and those of their classmates.In addtion, each
week students wrote, completing assignments and
writing prompts that were either directly connected
to their photographs or to the themes that we were
exploring: family, friends, community, and school.
The assignment shown in Figure 2, for example, fo-
cuses on the act of making the picture and its con-
tents. The format of the assignment in Figure 3 asks
studentsto describe details of the lives of the people
shown in the photograph, while the assignment in
Figure 4 provides a format for writing a short poem
based on the photograph's contents.
The excitement generated by the work mo-
tivated us all to do whatever possible so that stu-
dents could tell their stories with pictures. Lynda
Gremza, the teacher assistant in our class, printed
selectedphotographs, using her own computer and
scanner at home at night and on weekends. College
studentvolunteers from Brown University came to
class regularly to work with the students on their
spoken and written English. Over the course of the
semester,allof us sawthepersonal growth,increased
motivation, and sense of community that resulted
1. Who is in the picture?
"This is a picture of
2. Where are they from?
3. What was their life like when theywere in their countly?
a. What kind of work did they do?
b. Did they go to school?
c. Was their life easy or difficult? (Explainwhy.)
4. When did they come to the United States?
5. Why did they come to the United States?What do they
do now?
6. What is their life like now? (Includeinformationfrom
your photograph that will help us know what they do
and what their lives are like here in the US.)

5. Developing the Performance
Give your photograph a title. (Examples: The Person's
Name-i.e., "Luis," My Friends, My Family, Love,
My Home, Sisters, Snow, Rain, My Street, Tears, My
School,Learning, My Teacher, Work, Dancing, Prayer,
Community, Sleeping, Playing,etc.)
Whois in the picture?
Threewords that describe theirfeelings, what they are
doing,their relationshipto you, etc.
Whereare they?
Who is in the picture?
Examples:
Razor Cuts
Luis, Carlos and Me
Friends, Hanging Out, Together
In Our Community
Luis, Carlos, and Me
Friends
Xemina and Byron
Smiling,Content, and Shy
In Our Classroom
Byron and Xemina
Sisters
Carla and Lynda
Fighting, Laughing, Loving Each Other
In Our Living Room
Carla and Lynda
from giving these students the opportunity to do
good work and present it to one another and mem-
bers of the wider community.
An informal assessment of the project
showedthat students' oralandwritten language did
indeed improve as a result of their participation in
the project. So, too, did their facility and comfort
with cameras. They learned to tell storieswith and
aboutpictures. Sometimesthe storieswere poignant
and touching. Sometimesthey were playful.What-
ever qualitiesthe photographs displayed, theywere
alwaysauthenticand important to the students who
were tellingthem. Students learned, gained a great
deal of confidence through their work, and were
justly proud when their work was mounted first in
the school's conference room and later in a public
exhibition at Progreso Latino.
Kurt Wootton
By mid-March,we had a collectionof student pho-
tographs,poems,and stories.We then organizedthe
first exhibition of student work. Students stood in
front of their photos in the schoolconference room
and read their poem, letter, or storyto a smallgroup
of parents, teachers, administrators,and collegestu-
dents. The challenge now became to take the sto-
ries and photographs they generated and developa
theatricalproduction to present to alarger commu-
nity. Most of the studentshad never been on a stage
before. Manywere timidwhen participatingin class
discussions;somedidn't participateat all.Howwere
we to create an atmospherewhere theyallcouldfeel
safe and confident enough to perform on a stage in
front of a large audience? Donald King, artistic &-
rector of the Providence Black RepertoryCompany,
joined us as a collaboratingartist to help move the
students to performance. For the next ten weeks,he
visited twice aweek to help students conceptualize,
rehearse, and polish their performance. A former
high school football player, Donald, began by say-
ing to the students matter-of-factly, "Everyone on
the stage for the warm-up. It's just like playing
sports;you need to get your body ready to perform.
Reach up to the ceiling and STRETCH."
One by one students mounted the steps to
the stage and formed themselvesinto a circle. Don
took them through a series of stretches and move-
ment exercises.Always smiling,alwaysinsistent,he
introduced them to exercisessuch as the fast-paced
"Shake down, count down." In unison they "shook
out"each of their limbsin turn while countingdown,
beginning with ten. First ten quick shakes of one
arm, then the other arm, then each leg. Then nine
shakes,then eight,repeatingthe pattern until finally,
energized and laughing,they finishedby giving one
quick shake of each arm and each leg.
Thewarm-upsmoved fromphysicalto vocal.
"I can't hear you. Repeat after me," Don calledout.
Several rounds of 'RED LEATHER, YELLOW
LEATHER' were followed by several more rounds
of 'YOU KNOW YOU NEED UNIQUE NEW
YORK."' The students, many of whom were tim-
orous about their spoken English, began to pro-
nounce the tongue twisters more clearly and to
participate more wholeheartedly and confi-
dently. During the warm-ups, Don made eye

6. contact and spoke to every student in the class.
Every day the students began the class by gath-
ering in a circle on the stage to do warm-ups.
They looked at each other and laughed together.
The classroom community strengthened.
After warm-ups, students in groups of four
to six chose key words from a story one of the group
members had written-stories of friendship, school,
community, music, family-and created tableaux,
or "frozen sculptures." Designing tableaux around
single words helped the students to focus on the
central themes of the story and made language ac-
cessible for performance. When students felt suc-
cessfulwith one key word, they would then move to
sentences and eventually to dialogue. Each group
competed with the others to create the most imag-
inative tableaux. Students assessed their tableaux
with a simple performance rubric. (See Figure 5.)
After a group practiced forming tableaux
based on each group member's story, they then se-
lected one storyto interpret, againthrough a seriesof
tableaux.Slowly they addedwords and movementto
connect the tableaux. Eventually, the class had five
stories involving dialogue, movement, music, and
dance. To round out the performance, they added
two choral chants, "Children of the World and "Im-
migrant Chant," performed by the entire class,and a
Latino Rap, a hip hop scene involvingrap and dance.
The set for the performance consisted of two
projection screens cut to represent silhouettes of
North and South America. A series of student pho-
tographswasprojected ontothe silhouette:Crisolita's
mother and father holding hands in a flower shop,
Edwin's brother looking into the engine of a friend's
car. The students performed their stories with their
photographs as background. The images symbolized
Cooperates
Shows Commitment
Is Focused
Speaks Clearly
Speaks Loudly
Shows Appropriate Facial Expression
Is Energetic
Is Confident
a journey from another country to America and the
mixing of cultures in this town of one square mile,
Central Falls. The performance process was also a
journey for artists,teachers, and students.None of us
knewwhen we began where we would be at the end.
We came to see, though, that two essential features
of the journey were to create a community in the
classroom and to link it closelyto the students' home
communities outside the classroom.
Students stood in front of their
photos in the school conference
room and read their poem, letter,
or story to a small group of
parents, teachers, administrators,
and college students.
The importance of maintaining this link be-
came obviousone daywhen the students weren't fo-
cused in the warm-up; they playedwith the curtains,
talked to each other, participated half-heartedly.
Don calmly asked the students to step off the stage
and have a seat in the auditorium chairs. "Mother's
Day is coming soon. I want you to think of this per-
formance as a gift for your mothers, as a gift to your
community. All of us have to work together to cre-
ate something larger than ourselves.We all need to
play a part in that creation." Don found the heart of
the work. Performance is away to keep the students'
stories alive. It served as a medium for students to
communicate with their community. Moreover, in
preparing the performance, the students had tojoin
together as a classroom community for the art form
to be fully realized.
Creating in the Community/
for the Community
Eileen Landay
Beginning with the community built inside the Ac-
celerated Literacy classroom, the "Postcards from

7. America"project radiated out from a strong cen-
ter. One of Len Newman's favorite admonitions
to students is that they "take care of one another."
The activities that produced "Postcards" offered
many opportunities-and in fact, the necessity-to
demonstrate that care. By looking at their class-
mates' photographs, students looked directly into
one another's lives. By listeningto them talk about
those photographs and reading their writing, stu-
dents came to know more about how others in their
classthought and felt abouttheir worlds.Powerfully
aware of their tentative grasp of English and fear-
ingthey mightbe ridiculed,manystudentswere ini-
tially reticent about speaking English. Second
languagetheorists Krashenand Terrellspeakabout
a "silent period" when people first encounter situa-
tionswhere they must use a new language.
The"Postcards"project was designedtopro-
vide studentswith a focusand purpose for develop-
ing language; to create a challengeworth rising to;
and to promote self-regulation,the abilityto moni-
tor their own learning processes and select useful
strategies to complete a task, as Baum and others
describe, all while building a strong community in
which students supported one another in moving
from "silence" in English to "voice":
...[I]n the process of actingin and on their envi-
ronment people'svoices are fashioned. Butwhile
voice is tied to subjectivityand identity. ..[it]is
not an expressionof individualconsciousness
but a reflection of and a comingto termswith the
multiple and complexsocialrelationsand realities
that inform consciousnessand position the
individual.(Walsh33)
Explicit links were built between the class-
room and the wider community.In their photogra-
phy, writing,and performance work, students were
encouraged to cross the boundaries between their
classroomand family,classroomand town,and new
and old world. One vivid example is Donald King's
directivethat studentsconsiderthe "Postcards" per-
formance a Mother's Day gift.Other examplesexist
in the artifactsstudents created. HenryZepeda sent
this letter to his abuela in Central America with an
accompanyingphotograph:
Dear Abuela,
How areyou? I am fine.I miss you very much
andwish that you could be here with me. I am
sendingyou a photographfrom America.I took it
in our housein Central Falls. It is a picture of Vito-
no playing basketballin our bedroom. He is always
happy and he is feelingvery excited.When I look
at this picture, 1feelveryproud becausehe is my
littlebrother and he is having fun. The thingthat I
like most about this picture is that I took itjust as
Vitoriowas goingto shoot the ball. I hope that you
like the picture too.
Sincerely,
Henry
Evelyn Guiterrezwrote the followingpoem andtook
a photograph of her cousins Ronnieand Carolina.
The Kiss
Ronnie and Carolina
Kissing and loving,cousins
In the bedroom
Ronnieand Carolina
k 1
1; . L..W'. . : / .
"VitorioPlaying Basketball"Photo by Henry Zepeda

8. "The Kiss" Photo by Evelyn Gutierrez
These artifacts link several "communities of prac-
tice" as noted by Vygotsky,and Lee and Smagorin-
sky,eachofwhich sharesa set of socialpractices and
goals. By helping to create "Postcards from Amer-
ica,"students gain "tools" that have meaning across
communities,both in and out of school.
Finally,the rich network of connections be-
tween the work of this classroom and other orga-
nizations is evident in the manyacknowledgements
that appear in the program handed out at the
"Postcards" performance. Benefits accrue in both
directions: between the classroom and the local
newspaper, repertory theatre company,university,
and social service agency.
Thisyear's "PostcardsfromAmerica"project
at Central Falls represented a first step in incor-
porating photography into performance and liter-
acy work. As both Len Newman and Mary Beth
Meehan predicted, photography is a powerful tool
for building community and developingliteracyin
the setting they created. Len Newman is fond of
pointing out to his students that stories keep our
cultures alive, and that the ability to tell stories
leads to the abilityto link different aspects of one's
identity. Len explains that many immigrants have
felt pressure to abandon the old in adopting the
new. Through the communities that he and others
have created within and outside classrooms, stu-
dents have improved their verbal and visual lan-
guage and learned that in their new country their
stories are important.
"Postcards from America," with its network
of nested communities, gave thirty students an op-
portunity to document and communicate to others
the rich and complex experience of being a young
newcomerto the US. Theproject demonstrates the
power of what students can accomplish when sup-
ported by multiple overlapping communities that
have an interest in their development. Manyteach-
ers knowthis.They alsoknowhowtime-consuming
and difficult it is to bring these communities to-
gether to work productively. Organization is nec-
essary and takes time that many teachers do not
have. Some are fortunate enough to be able to
draw on support from sources such as the Arts/
Literacy Project. Others heroically manage on
their own.
While the scope of the "Postcards from
America" project may seem greater than many
classroomteachers feel ableto undertake, the ideas
behind it are applicable to any classroom: place
students' lived experienceat the center of the class-
room community,link them to resources and com-
munities outside the schoolhouse walls, use class
time to develop a product for public presentation
that both servesand connectsthe communitiesstu-
dents live in now and those they hope tojoin.
Note
1. A/LP is funded in part by The Providence Journal
CharitableFoundation,The Rhode Island Foundation,andthe
National EndowmentfortheArts.Brownfacultycodirectorsare
professors Eileen Landay and Nancy Hoffman. Landay's work
is supported in part by The Spencer Foundation's Small Re-
searchGrantsProgram.FurtherinformationaboutALPisavail-
ableon itsWeb site at www.artslit.org.
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Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York:
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Vygotsky.New York: Plenum, 1987. MEEHANis a writer and staff photographer for The Proui-
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EJ 2 0 Years AGO
Making Education "Tangible"
"The product of the school is unlike that of any other governmental agency. The public can see its tax monies paving
and plowing streets, painting benches in the park, delivering mail, fighting fires, buying books for the public library,
and patrolling streets. But the public cannot see education;it is intangible. Taxpayers have themselves been in school,
but they are suspiciousof it. . . .Furthermore, many schoolsare places, owned by the public, where the public is often
not welcome except for athletic, musical, and dramatic events. Classrooms are off limits to all except those students
and teachers assigned to them. Such an atmosphere creates the impression that something is going on in the school,
especiallyin its classrooms,that is at best mysterious and at worst subversive."
Robert Squires."The Classrooln Teacher and Public Relations."EJ 70.3(1981):23-25.